

A photograph in the top-floor room of an old building on a bright morning, bare boards and plain grey plaster, one tall window in the left wall throwing hard light straight across the room. A plain wooden control bar hangs from a nail low on that wall, tilted and left there, and five thin pale threads run from it to her head, her shoulders and her knees, all of them slack and curving, carrying nothing. She has gone down where she stands. Her feet are flat on the boards and taking her weight, her knees have buckled and turned in toward each other, her hips have dropped and swung out to one side, her whole torso is tipped over sideways above them and twisted a little, so the line from her head to her feet is broken at every joint instead of leaning as one piece. Her shoulders have dropped and rolled forward. Her arms hang as pendulums along her ribs, elbows slack, both hands turned palm-backwards and loose at the wrists with the fingers half curled. Her head has fallen sideways onto one shoulder, her hair spilled across her cheek, her eyes open and resting on her own hanging hand. An oversized man's charcoal wool coat has slipped off one shoulder and hangs from that elbow. The hard light crosses her and prints her broken shadow and five long thin lines across the plaster behind her, and that shadow is the largest black shape in the picture. She stands at the left edge and the edge cuts through her far shoulder. The wall of shadow fills the rest. Everything is grey, black and old wood except her skin. Fine grain. In the lower right corner, a small pencil signature: Ziggy